Chantal Joffe was born in St. Albans, Vermont, USA on 5 October 1969. She immigrated to London, England around the 1980s to purse higher education in the arts. Joffe, now a distinguished Royal Academician, is known for her expressive paintings of women, children and pregnancy.
Painter Chantal Joffe was born in St. Albans, Vermont, USA on 5 October 1969. Her mother Daryll Joffe is an artist who works with watercolours and her younger brother, Jasper Joffe is a British publisher, novelist and contemporary artist. Joffe immigrated to the UK to pursue higher education in the arts, first completing a foundation year at Camberwell College of Arts in London from 1987 -88, followed by a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art (1980-91) and an MA in Painting from London's Royal College of Art (RCA, 1992-94).
After her graduation from the RCA, Joffe gained recognition with small-scale, highly precise paintings of explicit sexual content, using vibrant colours and clear contrasts. Joffe’s practice later evolved but she still maintained her earlier expressiveness. The transition from depicting pornographic content to motherhood indicates her fascination with the full spectrum of the human reproductive process. Her oeuvre includes paintings of widely different dimensions, from miniatures to monumental scale (up to 3 metres) and a focus on the themes of how motherhood and age transform women’s bodies. Joffe's works, capturing domestic scenes, leisure, and the anxiety of becoming a mother, are characterised by swift, broad brushstrokes, leaving trails of wet paint. Her nudes feature dark reds and pinks set against background colours, such as apple green, with fluorescent details. Despite the spontaneity in her later works, her early meticulousness persists in deliberate gestures, distinct colours, and minimalistic backdrops. She is inspired by the evolution of figuration across the 20th and 21st centuries, and by a range of painters, including Pierre Bonnard, Alex Katz, Henri Matisse, Alice Neel, Paula Rego and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
In 2015, over 30 of Joffe’s new paintings were exhibited in the lobby of New York’s Jewish Museum under the title Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Chantal Joffe. Joffe painted portraits of Jewish women of the 20th century who have influenced art, literature, philosophy, and politics, including figures such as Hannah Arendt, Diane Arbus, Susan Sontag, Nancy Spero, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas. Joffe's expressive and gestural painterliness transcends physical likeness, capturing her artistic and emotional interpretations. Through extensive research, she formed connections with her subjects, using varied texts and images to portray these women at different life stages. This collective portrait served as a homage to their legacies and as a modern inspiration, subtly acknowledging the women lost in the Shoah, whose contributions were erased from history. More recently, Joffe's exhibition Personal Feeling is the Main Thing which opened at The Lowry in Salford in 2018, was inspired by from Paula Modersohn-Becker, a pioneering yet overlooked German Expressionist and avant-garde painter. Many of her pieces were destroyed by the Nazis. Her work was démodé in her time in its depiction of nudes and motherhood, blending glowing colours and experimental outlines. Joffe shares Modersohn-Becker directness in portraying the mother-child connection. Joffe's exhibition, integrating some of Modersohn-Becker's own works, functioned as a tribute to the German artist who died soon after giving birth, introducing her to the UK audience. Joffe also works with public commissions. Her 2018 piece A Sunday Afternoon in Whitechapel was displayed across the platforms of the Elizabeth line station in Whitechapel, capturing the feeling of the local East London neighbourhood and inspired by Joffe's own experiences locally. Originally created as a series of compact paper collages, these works were later transformed into laser-cut aluminium pieces.
Joffe has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, and is represented in London and Venice by the Victoria Miro Gallery, which regularly presents her solo exhibitions. Joffe has also received a number of awards and recognitions throughout her career. In 1993, while at the RCA, she received the Elizabeth Greenshields Award and the Paris Studio Award. The following year she received the Delfina Studio Trust Award, which she held until 1996. Between 1998 and 1999 she attended the British School at Rome on an Abbey Scholarship. In 2006 Joffe was honoured with the Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. In 2013, she was elected a Royal Academician (RA) and has shown annually at the RA since then. Chantal Joffe lives and works in London and maintains a studio east of the city, near Old Street. In the UK her works feature in numerous public collections, including the Arts Council Collection, Government Art Collection, Jerwood Collection, National Portrait Gallery, Pallant House Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, and the Royal College of Art.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Chantal Joffe]
Publications related to [Chantal Joffe] in the Ben Uri Library